San Jon, when we finally reached it, consisted mostly of towering stacks of cedar posts and thousands of huge coils of wire—for it was Isinglass’s aim to encircle the whole of the Whiskey Glass ranch with barbed wire, an aim defeated only by his own endless hunger for land. I recently saw an article in some Texas paper about old Leon, the Mexican leader of Isinglass’s fencing crew, who spent his entire adult life in an attempt to complete the fence around the Whiskey Glass, toiling year after year on the long prairies with his mules, his men, his posthole diggers, and his wire, only to have Old Whiskey acquire, by purchase or fiat, another fifty square miles just as Leon thought his task was finally completed.

Except for the old man’s fencing yard, San Jon consisted of only four buildings, but news of the battle at Skunkwater Flats had somehow spread and there was a crowd of some fifty people waiting to see the bodies of what was already being called the Greasy Corners Gang, although Barbecue Campbell and Henry Knogle had never even been to Greasy Corners, and the others had stopped there for a few weeks only because it seemed a convenient place to gamble and whore.

Soon the undertaker got started and a photographer was snapping away. I heard later that the undertaker had some trouble with Barbecue Campbell, rigor mortis having set in while the corpse was wedged sideways in the door of that hut; I believe they had to pile two anvils on him to get him straightened out, and even then it didn’t really work. In all the pictures I’ve seen of the so-called Greasy Corners Gang, Barbecue looks as if he’s about to pitch forward on his face.

“I wonder why people enjoy looking at dead bodies so much,” Isinglass reflected. We simply left the bodies and continued on toward the headquarters of his ranch, still some sixty miles to the north. I was allowed to mount a horse for this part of the trip.

“I don’t know that they enjoy it,” I said, “but we’ll all be dead someday. I suppose people have the notion that if they examine enough dead bodies they can figure out what death’s like.”

“There ought to be a way to beat it, that’s what I think,” Isinglass said.

Coming from such a monument to practicality, it was a surprising statement.

“If you mean death, I doubt there’s a way to beat it,” I said.

The old man looked distinctly gloomy. He had emptied the whiskey barrel in San Jon and was nearing the bottom of his last quart as we rode along.

“You’ll do fine with Cecily,” he said. “She’s a damn pessimist too.”

2.